november 3, 2000. Listening to: "Turkey In the Straw," running through my head in an infinite loop. Sometimes I have these Sharon Lois & Bram* moments. I'm sorry, but I did grow up in the 80's. You'll just have to bear with me when they manifest. This has just been one of those weeks. On Saturday a nor'easter came to town & ignored all of our polite hints that really, enough was enough and could it please go away for a little while. Then again, all it's done to me is reduce my buoyancy and delay a trip to the laudromat; lots of people have been killed in nor'easters. I'm told that all the people living in the fishing villages of Nova Scotia have lost at least one family member in a storm like this. Yeah. I should be grateful that my husband delivers videos for a living; Hollywood may be in a strange state these days, but it has yet to become widely known as a widowmaker. I suppose the key word there is "yet." There's been a tonne of work to do lately, and it'll get worse before it gets better. In the next ten days I have large, complex, summative projects due in four different classes. I'm already beginning to fester. And then Ginko went & committed suicide. Very long-time readers of online diaries may remember that in June of 1997, a button suddenly appeared on a whole bunch of web pages that declared it to be "Celebrate Ginko Week." This was back when I was far more involved with the politics of journalling, and the whole thing made me kind of pissed off. I couldn't figure out what everyone was going on about, especially since I myself couldn't find a whole lot to relate to in her journal. That day I was tired, sunburnt & very cranky...so instead of thinking sanely about what I was doing, I decided to be a bitch. I stole the button, added the words "I don't" to "Celebrate Ginko Week," wrote some nasty things about download time and posted the whole thing before going off to find some Noxema & take a nap. I got flamed. Badly. And in the course of being flamed, I discovered that this was not, in fact, a fatuous group hug-a-thon; that Ginko genuinely needed to feel loved & appreciated for her not-inconsiderable web page and efforts to organize the diary community. I will never apologize if I think that I'm right (I'm a jerk that way.) But in this case, it was so manifestly obvious that I was in the wrong that I had no choice but to be big about it. I apologized very publicly and very thoroughly. So it's not that I feel guilty for adding more pain to her load. It's not that I feel personally responsible for destroying her. It's just that once again, I feel like an asshole for writing & posting before I bothered to check on the facts. I learned something valuable that day: you should never write something that you wouldn't say to that person's face. Instant communication and worldwide access demands basic manners. And I'm sorry that she's gone. I never thanked her for the lesson. A new craze is sweeping through the ranks of my Toronto friends: the Personality Test provided by the good folks at The Spark. They've been bugging me to do the test for a while so that we could find out how compatible we all are. Yesterday morning I gave in & did the test. (I should've been working on the mini-unit that's due on Thursday, but it was one of those mornings when my best efforts were going nowhere. The kind of morning where you set to work diligently, but when you look up after three hours you discover that you haven't done anything at all, that in fact you've been running in place the whole time. Those kinds of mornings. Across from me, a girl with the same assignment deadlines carefully drew a large cartoon Tigger, ignoring her open books. The slack was endemic, is what I'm trying to say.) So. I'm a Dreamer, a Submissive Introverted Abstract Feeler to be exact. Tell me something I don't know. But! The compatibility scores were most interesting. Fast Eddie: 35% compatible. Stacy: 50%. Kandyraver Kat: 56%. Tymothi:J: 62%. St. Jack: 65%. Dirk: 69%. Ian: 72%. St. Stephen: 84%. Talk about your crappy results... My first reaction was disbelief. Fast Eddie is compatible with all organic matter, and quite a bit of non-organic as well. 35%?!?! No way. I was only 50% compatible with Stacy? What?? In short, I began to wonder what was keeping us all together, since I'm obviously at odds with everyone. No wonder I feel lonely all the time. But then the Boy took the test. He & I are 98% compatible, so I feel a little better. Not a lot, but a little. * Sharon Lois & Bram: a trio of immensely popular Canadians who sing children's songs. Their contribution to the preservation of oral history and multiculturalism can not be overstated. They also do a mean version of "Paw-paw patch."